I do not care what Omarosa has to say about anything, and I also don’t care that the presence of a strong black woman on the Democratic ticket is bound to cause Donald Trump to say some really racist shit. The issue has never been Trump’s racism, which few now truly deny. The issue is that Trump has revealed that this kind of racism is still an extremely potent force in American politics. The issue is that it might not actually hurt Trump’s chances if he makes really blatant racist comments. For him, it’s quite possible that the more explicitly racist he is, the better his chances.
His theory all along has been to polarize the electorate by getting as many white people as possible to vote for him based on his obvious preference for white people. It’s something I predicted would happen long before I ever contemplated that Donald Trump might be a serious candidate for president. It’s hard to believe that I wrote The GOP is Moving in the Wrong Direction over seven years ago, but it shows that I saw where things were headed.
At the time, I was responding to a piece by Benjy Sarlin on the Republicans’ refusal to work with President Obama on comprehensive immigration reform despite the fact that the Republican National Committee’s post-2012 autopsy report on Mitt Romney’s loss emphasized the need to do better with Latinos.
What Mr. Sarlin doesn’t broach is the subject of how conservatives might be able to grab a higher percentage of whites and how they might go about driving up white turnout. The most obvious way is to pursue an us vs. them approach that alternatively praises whites as the true, patriotic Americans, and that demonizes non-whites as a drain on the nation’s resources. This is basically the exact strategy pursued by McCain and especially Romney. It’s what Palin was all about, and it’s what that 47% speech was all about.
An added element was introduced by Barack Obama, whose controversial pastor and Kenyan ancestry opened up avenues for both veiled and nakedly racist appeals to the white voter. A white Democratic nominee would be less of an easy target for talk about secret Islamic sympathies and fraudulent birth certificates, but that would only make other racially polarizing arguments more necessary.
The problem is that these attacks have already been made, and they failed in even near-optimal circumstances. Accusing the Democrats of socialism, which is a race-neutral way of accusing the party of being beholden to the racial underclasses, has been proven insufficient. The only hope for a racial-polarization strategy is to get the races to segregate their votes much more thoroughly, and that requires that more and more whites come to conclude that the Democratic Party is the party for blacks, Asians, and Latinos.
That is, indeed, how the party is perceived in the Deep South, but it would be criminal to expand those racial attitudes to the country at large.
The Republicans are coalescing around a strategy that will, by necessity, be more overtly racist than anything we’ve seen since segregation was outlawed.
Seen in this light, Donald Trump wasn’t an aberration but more like the logical person to fill a vaccuum that the rejection of immigration reform had created. Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio represented a path that had already been rejected not just by the Republican base, but by the congressional Republicans and their leadership.
I clearly saw Trump as the fulfillment of this shift in the GOP when I wrote Trump and the Missing White Voters in December 2015. And I immediately tagged the strategy as successful in my Avoiding the Political Southification of the North piece that I wrote two days after the 2016 election. I never saw Trump as an essential feature of Trumpism, although he certainly brings his own unique flavor to things.
The Conservative Movement is fairly racist by nature, but it’s political necessity that has brought out the worst in them since 2013. They could have tacked to the middle on a host of issues, but conservatives didn’t want to budge. The fact that immigration was their biggest stumbling block is instructive, especially because we’ve seen a lot of their core beliefs fall by the wayside during Trump’s presidency. It turns out that everything was negotiable except the browning of America. The free traders and internationalists are shocked at what’s become of their old party, and the pro-military folks are appalled that Trump won’t defend our troops against Russian bounties. But this was all kind of inevitable in a way, once the party decided that it would rather polarize the white vote than reach out to non-whites. It’s a time-limited strategy, as eventually demographics will overwhelm them, but it barely worked four years ago. It could work again, but it will be much harder with a pandemic and a bad economy weighing Trump down.
It’s just sickening that it strategy still has a rational basis, even if it never had even the smallest moral one.
In this regard, the best case scenario for the next 12 weeks is that Trump’s popularity takes another big, lasting hit (perhaps over the Post Office scandal?) dropping him from 7 points behind Biden to 9-10 points behind, resulting in an electoral college landslide where Biden wins 400+ votes, including AZ, FL, GA, and TX. In this scenario, Democrats expand their margin slightly in the House and pick up 6 or more Senate seats.
With that kind of electorate—and with the demographic tide coming in across the South and Southwest over the next 20 years—polarizing around racist policies shifts from being a political necessity to being political suicide for Republicans nationally. They’d be a rump party, reduced to a base scattered across parts of Appalachia, the Great Plains and the interior West.
What really drives me up a wall are people like Sean Trende, who really just fundamentally don’t seem to understand what they were even saying or the implications of it. I’d have said they were playing coy before, but when you look at his analysis today it’s got so much “no one could have predicted this!”
I have several screenshots of your 2013 article ready. I use them often.
Sean Trende knew what he was doing. I called it out even at the time.
Trump is the explicit realization of that strategy.
That’s really well stated, Martin. Thank you.
Right on Martin. I recall thinking in the mid 2000s that all of the ‘illegal immigration’ talk on the right was flat out racist because they were actually not against illegal immigration at all- they were against ANY immigration full stop. Those idiots were weaponized within the GOP as you point out, and here we are.
Is there a historical precedence of how a major party collapses in US? I am not clear whether the Federalist and Whig parties fall in that category.
In my country of birth – India – I now see that happening to the “communist” parties. They were the rump adherents to discredited Maoist Leninist ideologies. They had two strongholds – my native state of West Bengal, and Kerala. In the last 2 elections, they got completely wiped out – as in zero seats in local and national legislatures – where they had dominated in state and national politics in an outsized manner. In West Bengal they had been in power 27 years.
I am hoping that this current incarnation of the nihilist Republican party will go down completely to zero representation at some point.